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CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Now Starring at the Movies: Famous Dead Women

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: October 25, 2009

For actresses, it is no longer enough to be young and beautiful onscreen, they have to be dead and famous, too -- one of history's immortals. Filmmakers have long resurrected the dearly and notably departed with actors and actresses who flatter their memories, of course, partly because Academy members like to reward other success stories. Last year, Marion Cotillard warbled her way to the awards podium for her turn as ?ith Piaf in ''La Vie en Rose.'' Since 2000, six of the best actress awards were for biographical performances, most of dead women. This year, Julia Child, Coco Chanel, Queen Victoria, Keats's great love, Fanny Brawne, and now Amelia Earhart are all making a run for it.

You can't blame filmmakers (or actresses) for raiding crypts. It's rarely been more difficult to be a woman in the movies than now, particularly in the United States, where for the past few decades most blockbusters and microbudgeted D.I.Y. enterprises have been overwhelmingly male. Last year, only one movie about a woman -- ''Twilight,'' the vampire romance about a living teenager and her undead but supercute boyfriend -- squeezed into the ranks of the Top 10 grossing titles, a chart dominated by superheroes and male cartoon characters. Another two female-centric stories climbed into the Top 20. That sounds shocking except that only three such stories made it to the Top 20 in each of the previous two years.

Genre titles like ''Twilight,'' however, don't generally attract the critical love, peer regard and statuettes that performers and executives crave. That's why Charlize Theron, who began her career brandishing a lot of leg and doing time as the usual masculine accessory, packed on the pounds in ''Monster'' to play Aileen Wuornos, a Florida drifter turned serial killer. Ms. Wuornos was executed in 2002 for the murder of seven men; the movie hit theaters a year later, and Ms. Theron soon went on to win the Oscar for best actress on what would have been Ms. Wuornos's 48th birthday. It's also why Nicole Kidman wore a fake schnoz to play Virginia Woolf in ''The Hours'' and Cate Blanchett put on clown makeup to impersonate the Virgin Queen.

Hilary Swank doesn't wear a prosthetic to play Amelia Earhart in the new movie about the aviator: she has a man on her arm instead. The film ''Amelia'' subscribes to the Great Woman Theory of history, which, as is often the case with distaff stories, largely involves the great woman and the men in her life. In male biographies, women tend to silently suffer or whine and shriek on the sidelines. The main suffering here is done by Earhart's husband, the publisher G. P. Putnam (Richard Gere). His tears help domesticate the aviator, who's never allowed to fly solo, at least metaphorically. The real Earhart urged young women to pursue careers: ''If we begin to think and respond as capable human beings able to deal with and even enjoy the challenges of life, then we sure will have something more to contribute to marriage than our bodies.''

Evidently Earhart's bobbed hair, fondness for slacks and unyielding independence -- on the eve of their wedding, she gave Putnam a prenuptial letter with an opt-out clause -- presented too confusing a vision of modern womanhood for filmmakers chasing what Hollywood types see as a fickle female audience. (Given the industry's wholesale embrace of antediluvian ideas about what women want and like, this group might be more rightly labeled the Dark Continent Demographic.) At the very least, you would have thought that the people behind ''Amelia'' would have noticed that, in the last Democratic primary, a lot of potential ticket buyers voted for an independent woman with cropped hair and a penchant for pantsuits. Then again Hillary Rodham Clinton only made it to the State Department, an achievement unlikely to rate a glossy biopic treatment.

Secretary Clinton, played by Hope Davis, is slated for a supporting role in ''The Special Relationship,'' a fiction film about the political coupling of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Still-breathing famous men get plenty of shots to shine (''W.,''''Frost/Nixon''). But if you want to watch a movie about a powerful, interesting, difficult, believable, remotely recognizable woman these days she should certainly be famous and probably dead. Achievement alone isn't usually enough to rate the biographical treatment and neither is merely a compelling story. Moreover, historically female-friendly genres, like the romantic comedy, are now often a guy thing. Sandra Bullock still pulls in audiences with trifles like ''The Proposal,'' but the biggest romance of the year was the comic male three-way ''The Hangover.'' Even melodrama is now saturated by the tears of widowed fathers who, unlike average mothers, are sanctified by their struggle to juggle family and work.

Female stories have become so marginalized on American movie screens, we should be grateful filmmakers are raiding the history books. In addition to the recent run on Chanel, there are competing Dusty Springfield projects and endless speculation that we'll finally see the real Janis Joplin. (Cable, where older film actresses sometimes go when big-screen work starts to dry up, recently brought us a movie about Georgia O'Keeffe.) A few living legends (Joan Jett, possibly Winnie Mandela) are even getting their due. That's surprising because most movie people don't always see the point or the profit in living women. (Well, unless, as in ''An Education,'' she is 16, ready to be deflowered and safely foreign.) A woman has to have been legitimized by history, ruled a country, inspired a poet, or ignited a revolution in fashion or cooking to have a shot at some serious screen time. It also helps if she's played by Meryl Streep.